Gordian knot of the OUN-UPA problem nourishes separatism
In the past I often had to take part in various so-called festivals of the friendship of peoples, which were supposed to demonstrate the emergence of the Soviet people, a new historical entity, within the USSR. I was struck by how different we — Russians and Estonians, Ukrainians and Tajiks — were. All that united us was the intelligentsia educated in Soviet schools and universities. Now that I participate in the study of the OUN-UPA problem I have recalled that old impression because I have seen how different Ukrainians themselves are. No doubt, the second half of the twentieth century saw a revival of the unity we had lost during the previous six centuries, when we were under different states. Although the past ten years of living in an independent state has knitted us still closer, differences, however, still remain.
Since we are in transition to a market economy, these differences have even deepened in the socioeconomic sphere. Poverty and wealth disunite society not only at the individual level but also in the territorial dimension. Addressing the Congress of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs in March 2000, Leonid Kuchma emphasized a colossal 14-fold gap among our regions in terms of per capita industrial output. Lviv oblast apart — the western region is one of the least developed — this has a tremendous impact on the people’s incomes and employment. The state cannot so far level, as in the totalitarian epoch, the objective difference in incomes. This alienates the population from the authorities and instills in some individuals an aspiration to become independent of Kyiv. The unresolved problem of OUN-UPA could become powerful nourishment for separatism.
Let me remind you in brief what the double abbreviation stands for. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) emerged in Western Ukraine in 1929 as a clandestine paramilitary structure which fought against Polish oppression. After its first leader, Yevhen Konovalets, was assassinated, it split into the warring factions lead by Andriy Melnyk and Stepan Bandera. From the fall of 1939 onwards, the two OUNs spearheaded their struggle against Soviet forces, although they never forgot the Poles either. Even at the time when Hitler and Stalin cultivated a most close friendship, the OUN people considered the Nazis their natural allies. However, the then self- confident Germans did not want to arm those they considered Slavic Untermenschen. Thus the Ukrainian nationalists acquired a third enemy. To counter the Germans, they formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the Wehrmacht’s rear. When the Soviet Army returned, some UPA units were defeated, others went West. Those who remained behind resisted the Sovietization of western oblasts until the mid-1950s.
The Moscow center waged a struggle against OUN and UPA mostly by means of eastern Ukrainians mobilized into the army, police, security forces, and various sectors of the economy. Disgust at the Bandera followers was being instilled in the whole population of eastern regions by education, propaganda, and mass provocations by the security forces. The consequences of this policy are still felt. Conversely, the population of western regions regards Bandera’s warriors as heroes. It is crystal clear that the rebels could not have survived in the forests and mountains without an infinite popular support. Hundreds of thousands of men went through this army. The local population developed an active immunity to provocations by security forces disguised as rebels.
In 1991 the fighters against Soviet power found themselves in the nation- state they had dreamed of. The Ukrainian parliament flies the blue-and-yellow flag under which they fought. Passports now display the trident, once an indispensable insignia of the UPA uniform. However, this state, like the Soviet one before it, does not extend to UPA veterans the privileges granted to Soviet World War II, law-enforcement, and Afghan-Soviet War veterans.
On October 22, 1993, President Kuchma signed the law On the Status of and Social Security Guarantees for War Veterans. This enumerates the categories of individuals recognized as participants in combat actions. The law cites among them “combatants of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army who participated in military operations against the Nazi German invaders on the Ukrainian territory temporarily occupied in 1941-1944 and who committed no crimes against peace and humanity and were rehabilitated under the law On the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression in Ukraine.” Thus, there are two constraints, of chronology and principle.
In the fall of 1944 the territory of Ukraine was liberated from the Nazis. Those who joined UPA later automatically drop off the list of combatants. In a clear contradiction to the principle of the presumption of innocence, the applicable Ukrainian law demands that a UPA militant prove that he committed no crimes against peace and humanity. Without any doubt, this norm was laid down by those who were taught from their childhood to hate the Bandera fighters.
In the times of Nikita Khrushchev hundreds of thousands of those hitherto condemned as enemies of the people were rehabilitated. The approach of the KGB investigators to the accusation formula drawn up by their resourceful predecessors during the Stalin period was primitive but effective: “This could not have happened because this could have never have happened.” But now, SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) investigators are no longer guided by this simple regulation. The law requires consideration of each specific concrete criminal case. But how can one separate the truth from lies?
Former political prisoner K. Hromyk (from Khartsyzsk) wrote this country’s leaders last March, “We are now all over seventy. Thank God, we have lived to see our independent Ukraine, the coveted goal for which we fought and suffered. Many of us have not yet been rehabilitated, for our butchers, security force investigators and military tribunals, did their best to denigrate us forever. You can find everything in our archival files: we are public enemies, Nazi henchmen (what cynicism!), and God knows what else. When our SBU officers dig up such a file they put it in the bottom drawer, believing those brazen lies without listening to the victim himself or the eyewitnesses of those events. Many of us are sick and bed-ridden, suffering from wounds, but still unable to get ourselves listed as disabled war veterans, for we are not considered participants in combat actions. There are two hospitals in Donbas for Great Patriotic War veterans, but they are closed to us!”
Hence the law of Ukraine of October 22, 1993, is unable to meet the needs of UPA veterans. This is why in June 2000 the Cabinet of Ministers instructed the Ministry of Justice to draft a new law. Working on the bill, On Restoring Historical Justice in the Struggle of the Ukrainian State for Freedom and Independence in the Period from 1939 through the Mid- 1950s, the ministry turned to our task force set up as part of the Government Commission based on the Institute of the History of Ukraine to study the activities of OUN-UPA. The task force was not yet prepared to pronounce the historical conclusion on the problem under study, nor is it prepared to do so now. This did not mean, however, that the researchers, who had been studying the problem for years, did not have an integrated and quite ample picture of the facts they dealt with. Yet, the main thing for us is not to express our viewpoint but to debunk the myths that have been created for decades concerning this problem. Our historical conclusion should rest on a set of verified, analyzed, and published archival documents. This time-consuming work will go on through 2003.
As the ministry needed a document to rely on while drafting up the bill, we directed our efforts and prepared what we called our tentative version of a historical conclusion. The Day published the abridged version of it in No. 37, December 19, 2000, in the article “OUN-UPA: Truth Is What Matters,” while the complete Ukrainian text was printed in Suchasnist’ (2001, No. 2). The media has already highlighted a host of reactions to this document. I would like to analyze reaction to the law the Justice Ministry has drafted taking into account of the tentative historical conclusion on the OUN-UPA problem and sent to public and non-governmental organizations in September 2000. All the responses were collected by the Cabinet of Ministers and then forwarded to the task force of historians. Some of them have been published in the press.
Now I must make a private digression, otherwise I will just not be able to express my frank and exact opinion on reactions to the draft law. My father fell victim to repression well before the war, in the year I was born. A Great Patriotic War veteran came into our family only after I married. My father-in-law, Grigory Varezhnikov, an ethnic Russian, had been in the war from beginning to end, was demobilized disabled, but still worked all his life. 37 years of communicating with him has fundamentally broadened my horizons. Although we often disagreed, the problem of fathers and sons never arose. I learned to properly understand the people of his generation, the more so that there is just only a ten-year gap between me and the youngest veterans. My father-in-law would encourage me when his comrades ran down too vehemently my national history schoolbooks. He was not shocked by proposals to furnish war-veteran privileges to UPA members. By the end of his life he had attached no fundamental importance to our differences in political views. He would note philosophically that there was enough space for everyone in the military hospitals, for the number of people of his generation was declining rapidly.
I do not think we should confuse war veterans and their leaders. The interests of the former and the latter do not always coincide. The high moral prestige of Great Patriotic War participants should not be privatized by those who have made a profession out of leading a veterans organization. The Council of the Organization of Ukraine’s Veterans headed by retired Gen. Herasimov has unveiled a campaign to criticize the bill On Restoring Historical Justice in the Struggle for Freedom and Independence of the Ukrainian State in the Period from 1939 through the Mid-1950s. The president, Verkhovna Rada, and the Cabinet of Ministers are receiving dozens of scathingly-critical letters from all parts of Ukraine.
The analysis of letters shows that they are all (without exception) only about the period of the Great Patriotic War. The leaders of veterans organizations almost always ignore the confrontation between UPA and the Soviet regime in the postwar period. All their resolutions were based on the demand not to equate what they called the still unpunished Bandera followers with front-line soldiers and not to extend privileges to them.
This mass campaign was crowned with success. Surprisingly, none of this country’s leaders noted that the Soviet veterans’ organizations are spearheading their criticism at a problem that has already found a legislative solution. For wartime UPA fighters have been recognized combatants under a law of Ukraine from October 22, 1993, and many of them are already making use of their entitlements.
Embarrassed as I am, I still cannot ignore the unprofessional style of the official documents of veterans’ organizations. They feature even such expressions as Melnyk’s Banderites (in a letter of Ternopil-based Soviet veterans submitted by People’s Deputy Symonov to the Presidential Administration on March 22, 2001). The letters’ leitmotif is that Ukrainian nationalists were condemned by the international Nuremberg tribunal. In particular, addressing this country’s leaders through the newspaper Komunist (March 1, 2001), chairman of the Council of the Organization of Ukraine’s Veterans, I. Herasimov; chairman of the International Ukrainian Union of War Participants, V. Bakushyn; chairman of the council of the Kyiv City Organization of War Veterans, V. Anastasiyev; and chairman of the Kyiv Organization of Veterans, H. Kushnirov write, “The international tribunal, held at Nuremberg, found out in no uncertain terms that the OUN ringleaders had been involved in a criminal conspiracy with the authorities of Nazi Germany aimed at the enslavement of the Slavic, including Ukrainian, peoples, establishment of a Nazi ghetto regime in captured territories, which meant destruction of the majority of the population of Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia. This was proved by documents that OUN-UPA committed all its criminal acts in cooperation with the Reich’s special services, including the Abwehr and Gestapo.”
I can say in reply that, before UPA was formed, the Ukrainian nationalists indeed made efforts to find a common language with the Nazis as enemies of Communist Russia. It is a deft propaganda ploy to impart a timeless nature to the existing documents by artificially linking them to the Nuremberg trial. In fact, UPA does not figure in its proceedings. Everything in that statement is a lie.
The Nuremberg trial was orchestrated by three sides each of whom pursued different, but coordinated political goals. Above all, the organizers agreed not to touch certain unacceptable subjects. For Stalin this was the period of Soviet-German relations from August 23,1939, to June 22, 1941. Secondly, they agreed that the tribunal would focus on activities of the Third Reich’s top figures. Perhaps the Soviet side could have put on the agenda an item about the so-called unpunished Bandera followers, but there was no political necessity at the time. Tellingly, the Nuremberg trial proceedings were published three times in the USSR during the postwar period. The latest edition of the 1980s was the most complete one, but it also contained not more than a third of materials printed in the multivolume English-language series published in Nuremberg in the late 1940s.
In conclusion, I would like to mention a passage from the foreword to the final volume of Ukraine’s Book of Memory published in 2000 under the title of Immortality. The foreword was prepared on behalf of this historical and memorial serial’s chief editorial board headed by Mr. Herasimov. Calling the Ukrainian nationalists a bunch of creepy numskulls (not on their own behalf but quoting a 1942 document), the chief editorial board went on to say, “It has been unambiguously revealed by a huge mass of documentary and research literature, both domestic and foreign, including a special study carried out on the instruction of the now working Government Commission on this issue, that OUN and its armed branches were in fact mercenaries of Nazi Germany fighting against countries of the anti-Hitler coalition and branded themselves as collaborators of Nazism.” I am unaware of this special study. There is no study like this among the three dozen books published since 1998 by the task force at the Government Commission to study the OUN-UPA activities. Thus this is a lie.
It is a cowardly type of lie. On June 19 Kyiv hosted an international scholarly conference devoted to the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The premises where the conference participants gathered displayed an exhibition of their latest works. When Canadian scholar Roman Serbyn took the floor, he came to the podium, took the book Immortality, opened the foreword at the last, eighth, page and compared this with what was in his copy bought abroad. The text was the same, but the three paragraphs on Ukrainian nationalists were somewhere missing. What could this mean?
